PingPong (YC W21, acquired by Grain)

PingPong's founders, Jeff Whitlock and Enaho Murphy, were working together between the US and Nigeria. Across that many time zones, text felt too cursory, and typing out detailed ideas took too long.

That raised a question: what if a business communication tool felt calmer, more personal, and more conversational? What if it gave you different kinds of media, depending on what you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it?

Brand. We wanted something simple that still had presence and felt actionable. TechCrunch named it one of the best logos of Y Combinator's W21 batch.

Interface. I chose a dark theme that's easy on the eyes and feels a bit like recording and editing software, which fit a product built around recorded messages.

Threads. Anyone who uses Slack knows that some of the most important conversations happen in threads, and that finding them later is hard. Which channel was it in? Which thread? We made threading the center of the product.

In PingPong, users could title their threads and set goals for a conversation. That made it easy to wrap up and archive a conversation once it had done its job.

Next on the roadmap was using AI to highlight key phrases in message transcripts.

PingPong went through Y Combinator's W21 batch and, about a year after I joined, was acquired by Grain, which makes smart transcripts for Zoom meetings.

Later in 2021, Slack began rolling out async video and audio clips, much like the messages at the heart of PingPong. It was a strong idea, and in the end larger companies were better equipped to bring it to market.